diamond dust
by Azalee
Summary: Sheba learns how to find warmth in the blizzard.  Sheba/Mia, written for the GSfest prompt round.


Written for the lj community GSfest, for the prompt _Sheba/Mia - diamond dust. ... _And a few other prompts as it proceeded to run away from me.

Contains tame femslash and absolutely no crack, somehow. Set between _The Lost Age_ and _Dark Dawn_, but no significant spoilers for either.

* * *

><p>Sheba only knows that she has fallen asleep when she wakes up; she registers the former before the latter, and flies to her feet in a panic with Ivan's words ringing in her ears:<p>

_Whatever you do, don't go to sleep, or it will be for the last time._

She breathes in harshly, hugging herself, and belatedly realizes that she _is_ breathing.

A soft chuckle confirms that she is not, in fact, dead.

"I wasn't expecting you. You're lucky we were so short on meat that the hunters left despite the storm, it's a miracle they even found you."

Mia smiles and lightly pushes down on Sheba's thorax, with a hand that is dry and warm, and Sheba collapses back down on the bed.

It's a bed. _A bed!_

"O Jupiter, it's a bed!" she moans.

There's another giggle, louder but higher-pitched, this time. Sheba blinks at the little girl staring at her from the bedside, ineffectually covering her mouth with her hands, turquoise eyes twinkling.

"A bed. Comfortable, isn't it?" Mia comments, good-humored, but lays her hand over Sheba's forehead in a practiced motion to check her temperature.

Her hand is blessedly warm and Sheba can't help grabbing it. She is gradually waking up to the world and registering the heat from the fire in the hearth, the softness of the thick woolen blankets, the delicious smell wafting from a bowl of soup on the bedside table; registering how cozy she's feeling.

But she remembers being _cold_, so cold, for what felt like so long, and that memory won't leave her just yet.

Mia squeezes her hand back and says, "You'll be fine," with a matter-of-fact and professional smile. "Now; this soup will hurt your taste buds, but you are going to eat it all, and then you'll tell me what in the world you are doing this far up North in the first place."

o

Sheba actually really, really likes the soup, but that might be because the Laliverans habitually season all their meals even _more_ and her taste buds have become indifferent to spice for reasons of survival.

Nowell refuses to believe it, though.

"But, it is _disgusting_," the four-year-old protests in a voice that is evidently supposed to be a whisper. Mia, model mother, pretends not to hear.

"Well, I like it," Sheba chirps back, lips twisted in a grin around the wooden spoon. "Are you going to tell me what I can and can't like?"

"But, but you _can't_ like Mother's soup!"

"Sure I can. I've eaten worse in my days."

Nowell's mouth opens in a round shape and her eyes widen. "Like what?" she whispers, lower but still very loudly.

Sheba's grin widens. "_Well_, in Kibombo -"

"Please don't tell my babies horror stories that will keep them awake at night."

"Aw, shucks," Sheba sighs, then makes a small, happy-little-animal noise of utter satisfaction and snuggles deeper in the blankets.

Mia chuckles and grabs little crawler Rief from the bed, easily heaving him up onto her lap. A toddler's weight is nothing compared to a battle mace, Sheba supposes. "So, Sheba," she begins, all business. "You haven't changed a bit, but it's been well over ten years. What brings you to Imil?"

"The wind," Sheba mutters in her pillow in a light, dreamy voice. "I just followed it, and it happened to be going North."

It's even true.

Mia raises an eyebrow, but she might believe her. "I'll have to check your head for concussion," she says in any case, clipped but not cutting. "Clearly you're not feeling completely well yet."

Sheba does see her point. For her, the desert girl, who loathed the Tundaria continent and hated Prox with all her might, to decide to come to Imil at the deadest of its neverending winter - she has to be just a little bit crazy, and blaming the winds is not helping her case, Jupiter Adept or not.

Well, she's always known that. But she confirms it when, later in the evening, she treads two steps outside the sanctum and almost dies all over again.

"I should _never_ have come here. What was I _thinking?_"

Mia laughs at her and Nowell _accidentally_ sends a splash of Mercury Psynergy onto her cheeks. Sheba considers dunking her head under the steaming water and staying in the tub until she melts. She has to give up on the idea when Mia grabs her small, _purple_ foot and starts vigorously rubbing her blood back into it; she hisses as the feelings start coming back to her, like a thousand icicles piercing the sole of her foot.

"Try again when you're well rested, fed, wearing four layers, and you can actually see the sun," Mia suggests with a crooked smile.

"Does that even _happen_ over here?" she whines.

It does. Around noon two days later, as the storm has receded, she can still see her own breath in the air, but she can pull down her hood and feel sunrays on her cheeks, _almost_ warm.

Everything is sparkling in the sunlight: the ground, covered in snow, the frozen river, the icicles hanging from the roofs of the wooden houses - even the air itself, she realizes. When she asks, Mia explains it's simply ice crystals in suspension in the air, and calls it diamond dust. Sheba isn't fond of the tiny flashing glares that keep blinding her no matter how many times she blinks, but she loves the name.

She had seen snow before coming to Imil - from the deck of a Lemurian ship, staring at a cerulean tower through a storm of hailing white, frozen flakes slapping her cheeks for the first time; and then, of course, there had been Prox. She hasn't seen much of it in the years since then, though, spending most winters in desert oases or exotic archipelagoes, having been all over the world again but never this far up north or down south, never back to the cold lands; until now.

Still, despite the fact she was only conscious for half of the trip from Bilibin Cave to the village, she thinks what snow she's recently seen is quite enough for a lifetime.

Mia makes it bearable, though, with her pretty names for frozen ground-level clouds, her spicy soup, her hand-sewn clothes, her clever children throwing handfuls of snow at each other and the way the three of them seem to blend in with the landscape.

"It's not that cold," she says. "You get used to it. The people here learn to make up for it with their own warmth."

"I assume you mean... warm-hearted character?" Sheba says lightly, but of course she thinks of other ways people can keep each other warm and she can't help the sultry smirk.

But when Mia turns back around, the look she throws at her through her eyelashes and the smile playing on her lips are _foxy_. "That, too," she says simply.

Sheba's throat tightens and for a minute, she completely forgets the cold.

Just for a minute, and then reality catches up and she sneezes like a dying desert-girl. From the cradle of Mia's arms, Rief gravely offers her his scarf, and she'd feel bad for taking something from a two-year-old but the hand-knit muffler just looks so _tempting_.

"Take it," Mia reassures her with a smile. "He doesn't feel half as much of the cold as you do. It's in the Mercury blood," she explains vaguely, shifting her son into a one-armed hold.

"Does that mean you lot are cold-blooded? Or is it blue?" Sheba quips, and gets a light smack in the shoulder from Mia's free hand.

So Mia was given near-immunity to killer temperatures from the Almighty Goddess Of Frostbite and doesn't wear a lot more than a cape over her thick dress, but she is still wearing gloves, just like Sheba. When she grabs her hand and entwines their gloved fingers like a pair of innocent preteen girls, Sheba feels the warmth anyway.

Nowell trips a couple times, but never gets upset and Mia doesn't seem worried that she might hurt herself: the snowbank blankets her falls. Sheba once reaches out her free hand to help her to her feet, but the little girl just makes a face at her and stands back up on her own. White snowflakes and twinkling ice crystals are scattered in her hair as she runs and tumbles in the drifts ahead of them, all the way to the Lighthouse.

Sheba remembers first seeing its shimmering light at night, en route to Prox and back, from across the frozen ocean and the icebergs. More recently, it guided her to Imil once she'd crossed the Bilibin cave, though of course she never reached it before collapsing, lulled to sleep by the blizzard. She's never seen the tower itself.

The beacon is reflected in the pool of the fountain; the water looks like liquid... something, something crystalline of a deep, unearthly blue. Jewels, maybe. It trickles in glistening trails down Mia's fingers - Sheba is first horrified to see her plunge her bare hands in springwater in this _cold_, Mercury Adept or not, but Mia simply laughs and brings her cupped hands to Sheba's mouth, so it's all she can do to comply and swallow; and she finds the water is in fact lukewarm. Delicious. Rejuvenating, almost like Water of Life. It kindles a soft glow in her chest, spreading, gently warming her up from the inside.

"Hermes Water," Mia says, plunging her hands in again and drinking in turn. Sheba watches spilt droplets dribble down her chin. "As potent as Ply; the reason I could leave the village and accompany the boys in the first place."

She was always the village healer, Sheba remembers Alex saying. Before the Lighthouse was lit, there were as many epidemics as could be expected from the weather, every single year; so many lives depending solely from the sanctum, from Mia, her Clan, her family and her apprentices. From Alex, too; but_ he_ had no qualms about leaving.

To Sheba, Mia was always the girl Alex left, before she even met her.

"Why did you come back, then?" she whispers, shivering a little.

Before answering, Mia makes her drink again, then shakes and wipes her hands before slipping her gloves back on. The droplets sent flying from her fingers freeze almost instantly in the frigid air, scattering and spattering down on the blue tile like, Sheba thinks, a hail of tiny diamond shards.

Mia actually doesn't answer at all, really: all she says is, "You'll see," with a little smile possibly reminiscent of Alex's and a sparkle in her eye like the beacon reflecting.

And after a while, Sheba does. She learns.

The storms are frequent, but seen from outside their eyes, they're beautiful; the force of Nature, unrestrained, unstoppable, immense. Sheba remembers the awe she had felt during that first blizzard of her life, standing on the deck of Piers' ship, before she'd quite discovered how very much she hated this thing. Seen from the other side of a glass pane, snowflakes seem to be dancing in the sky, and the raging winds don't so much howl as sing to Sheba's ears (though it's possible she might be the only one to hear it that way). Sheba spends hours knelt by the window, watching, listening, while Mia feeds the hearth and keeps adding pepper to the soup until even Sheba actually tastes it.

Then there are days when the storms relent, the sun comes out timidly and the sky is crystal-clear; Sheba walks out of Mia's house next to the sanctum and the air is fresh and crisp, the landscape looks bright and brand new and the odorless _smell_ of snow fills her lungs, and she cannot _help_ but run to cross the frozen river and join the kids in snowball fights in the streets.

And like Mia said, the people are warm. Aside from all the kids in the village, Sheba makes friends with Megan and Justin, Mia's disciples, who got married recently; with the shopkeepers, who wink at her and Nowell when the two of them do the groceries together; with the old couple near the southern village gate, who bicker all the time but still hold hands in the street. Sheba notices discrepancies in the population of Imil. For one, there seems to be only couples in the village, or widowers (though Mia is the youngest), with very few aged bachelors and quite simply no divorcees. For second, the few elderly people are _very_ old, with a large gap in ages before the fourty-somethings group - and then the heaps of young teens and children that make up half of the village.

"Most of our elderly died of illness before the fountain started running again, but now, it keeps us so healthy that everyone who isn't killed by a mauler bear is probably going to reach the age of ninety," Mia explains airily.

Sheba has seen the bears. They're nothing a (honorary) Warrior of Vale couldn't easily handle, but nothing to be trifled with, either.

"As for the heaps of children, well." Mia has a shrewd little smile that is not like a temple maiden at all - but it's only natural, the maiden's been married, she's had children herself. "The Lighthouse seems to have made the climate even colder than before, so people don't leave their houses a lot in the harsher season; thus, when I came back, suddenly everyone was giving birth at the same time. But thanks to the Hermes spring, most newborns actually survive now." Her hands are playing with Rief's blue hair, mussing it and smoothing it down again; he doesn't seem to be enjoying himself, but he suffers the gesture.

"Funny that it's not that different from Lalivero, in that respect," Sheba observes quietly. "Except the problem for our newborns and elderly was the dryness of the weather."

Sand, sand everywhere, always, grazing your skin as the wind slapped your cheeks, filling your mouth and lungs, always itching, grating. Suffocating, stifling heat; never enough air, always thirsty even though Lalivero, at least, never lacked water.

She never could find it in her to go home. She tried; she did come back to Lalivero, to Faran and his family, her adopted brothers and sisters, first thing after the rise of the Golden Sun - but it felt like she was only passing through, and she had to leave again. Every single time.

After two years and five returns that never were homecomings, she gave up trying, and simply kept traveling.

She's been at it for almost fifteen years now, always moving, never finding anyplace that could make her desire to stay stronger than the wanderlust their quest left her with. Mostly, she's fine with it. Felix and Piers understand her: they've been doing much the same, and she's spent a couple months a couple times traveling along with each of them - though lately, it's been both of them together. She's stumbled upon Ivan sometimes on coincidence, hiked rides across Angara with the Kalay caravans and crossed oceans on his new merchant ships.

The others, who settled down in one place and started families, she's naturally been seeing much less; she can count on one hand the number of times in the last five years that she's seen Jenna, her best friend. She'd quite simply never seen Mia again after the Mercury Adept had left the ruins of Vale to go back to Imil.

She had heard of Mia's marriage from Jenna, who'd heard it from Garet, who apparently made the trip to Imil regularly at the time and only then finally gave up on her. She had heard of the children from Ivan, who liked to keep tabs and visited everyone often because he'd kept the Teleport Lapis. She hadn't heard of the husband's fate, though, but doubts anyone else ever did.

Mia hasn't said anything since she arrived, but Sheba can't imagine any man could _leave_ her, and can only find one other explanation. She's chatted with the hunters; they are strong and experienced men, but there are an _awful_ lot of bears in the forests and mountains.

Fleetingly, Sheba wonders what it's like for a healer to be unable to save a life; but when she thinks about it, Mia must've been through it a dozen times before the Hermes fountain started running. The large graveyard is right next to the sanctum, and if Alex was her cousin, there must've been at least two branches to the family once upon a time, but Nowell and Rief never mention cousins, aunties, grandpas or anyone.

Sheba's conclusion, in fifteen years and one month of knowing Mia, is that this is a woman that does not need pity, and she has absolutely no reason to hold back. Thus she is absolutely shameless when she stands on tiptoes - she never did grow much taller - and breathes in Mia's ear, cheerily, "_So!_ what is, exactly, the relation between a baby boom and long evenings when it's cold outside and there's nothing to do?"

Mia glances at her out of the corner of her eye, one eyebrow raised. She takes her time primly tugging off one of her thin gloves, then slides her bare fingers inside Sheba's thicker mitten, snug between wool and skin. Her body heat, Sheba discovers, is actually just a little bit cooler than a normal human being's probably should be, but still much warmer than the ambient temperature outside; still warm enough to make Sheba's skin tingle.

"If you're a good girl and eat all your soup tonight," Mia says, casually, unabashedly, as if she were the properest lady of Tolbi talking about an invitation to tea, "I might consider explaining it to you."

Sheba feels her mouth stretch into a wide, wide grin. "I love your soup."

"I know, dear."

That evening, after dinner and soup, Mia asks her to put the children to sleep. Familiar by now with her motherly ways, Sheba understands that it's a sort of test, a proof she _must_ give that she can fit in the dynamic, in the family. If the children don't accept her, she'll be kicked back to the other side of the Bilibin mountain range before she can catch her breath, she realizes that. But she isn't worried: the kids have far too much fun teasing her to want her away, even now that she's slipped from being an intriguing novelty to part of the routine. And although she's never liked brats, these two are _endearing._

She didn't expect them to be such little devils come sleepy-time, though; but she manages. Rief is satisfied when her Djinn agree to let themselves be hugged, and Nowell stops jumping up and down once Sheba starts telling the Lemuria story. They fall asleep halfway through her fifth rendition of Yepp's song (extended version, all three verses); she smoothes Rief's fringe, carefully, tenderly, and quietly tiptoes back into the main room.

The front door is wide open for some unfathomable reason and she clutches the borrowed houserobe tighter around her shivering frame. Mia is standing on the threshold, naked, her hair spilled all over her breasts, her arms outstretched, her hands cupped.

"What are you doing? You'll freeze to death," Sheba protests, but her voice is weak, because she isn't even sure of that.

She grabs a blanket from the couch, makes to wrap Mia in it, but freezes and watches when Mia lifts her hands to her mouth. There are snowflakes gathered in them, and they're not even melting. Mia blows on them, softly, softly, but it's enough to whisk them away like butterflies fluttering in the harsh Imil winds.

Outside, the air is glittering.

"Diamond-dust," she whispers.

Slowly, Sheba pulls her by the hand back inside and closes the thick wooden door. "Pretty, yeah, but still damned cold," she mutters.

Mia laughs softly and follows her back to the warmth of the hearth.

o

Staring at the ceiling, Sheba reflects that Mia is, in many respects, Imil herself. Calm, somnolent almost in the blankets of snow, but when the storm rises, it's no use even trying to fight. Not as fragile, boring or unapproachable as she looks like at a first glance; actually resilient and unrelenting in her strength, and always fresh and new. Cold to the touch, but with inner warmth boiling just under the surface.

Oh, what warmth.

It feels like the most debauched luxury in the world, lazing around naked with another woman, on a thick bearskin in front of the blazing hearth, hearing the winds roar outside their small house, two children fast asleep in the next room. Stretching languidly over the heated fur carpet, Mia's bare arm slung over her hips, Sheba feels herself slowly fall in love with the town along as the woman, and for the first time, she thinks she could get used to it.


End file.
